


Bewitching the Mind: Ensnaring the Senses

by Oshun



Category: Howl Series - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: F/M, Gen, Hints at romance, fascination with magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-02-28 14:53:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2736686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oshun/pseuds/Oshun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for Yuletide 2014 for zephyrprince, who requested: “What I would like to see from this series would be some gen fic that explores how the magic system works in more depth.” Anyway, neither completely book canon nor movie canon. I ended up writing in the POV of Howl, still heartless, shortly after his first encounter with Sophie, musing about the differences in magic between his two separate worlds. I really hope you enjoy it, Zephyrprince. I enjoyed writing it. Two of my Betas, more familiar with the movie than the books, inquired about Howl in Wales, because I speak of Howl’s magical education there. I found a citation from howlscastle.wikia which summarized his early life in Wales succinctly:</p><p>“Howell Jenkins was born to an ordinary family in modern-day Wales. However, he himself was anything but ordinary. Gifted with a natural talent for magic, he began studying it. Even in college, he wrote his thesis on magical spells and charms, and joined a group of other gifted magicians on Earth.”</p><p>I want to extend a heartfelt 'thank you' to my Betas IgnobleBard, Thevina, Himring, and Zeen for reading and offering me concrit on this story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bewitching the Mind: Ensnaring the Senses

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zephyrprince](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zephyrprince/gifts).



 

 _“In the land of Ingary_ where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist . . . “ _Howl’s Moving Castle_ , Diana Wynne Jones.

 

In the _Real World_ , Howl thought, magic was rare and sometimes denied. But among the better read and educated it was acknowledged and presented as cut and dried, defined, regular, predictable, and quantifiable. Howl shifted in his bed, raising a light cloud of dust, which in turn caused him to sneeze. Cobwebs fluttered and a spider interrupted her work to swing down right in front of his face at the end of a long silver thread. He did not think he had imagined that she looked at him with air of condemnation. The things one endured for one’s magic!  
  
Rolling onto his side, he pressed his nose against the windowpane looking out upon Wales. Breathing upon it, he raised a fog and wiped it clean with the edge of his quilt. A sickle moon hung over the house in a starry sky. It must be nearly midnight there, he speculated. The window of the children’s room was dark and only a single shaft of golden light from the kitchen illuminated the gently swaying swing. All appeared to be well in his sister’s house.  
  
He shifted and yawned, his sleepy thoughts turning again to magic. In the world that encompassed Wales, one might aspire to study Magic at a famous university, in ancient ivy-covered halls lined with books smelling of dust and antique leather, exuding the faint sulfurous undertones of centuries-old mage craft or ancient wizardry of uncertain origin.  
  
Or, youngsters could, as Howl had, acquire their first formal introduction to those same arcane mysteries in a cluster of prefabricated, post-war two-story buildings on a utilitarian campus located in a working-class suburb in Wales. There he'd learned potions and charms, spells and incantations, as well as the history of magic, amidst the chatter of prattling, flirtatious females and the clumsy posturing of macho boy-men, with no more grace or courage than the same football hooligans who sought to bully students of magic and those of the non-magical arts and letters as well. Maybe he had deserved their attack on him, although not with such an extreme outcome.  
  
Whilst the young women scholars were often brighter than they appeared, their pimply-faced adolescent male compatriots seemed more ignorant than they acknowledged themselves to be. Compared to those poor excuses for the human male, it really was no wonder that girls found Howl appealing. He at the very least had an accurate sense of his own self-worth and was easy on the eyes. But they were all nonetheless, manly or feminine, struggling or gifted, crowded together into new or refitted, clean and polished laboratories, and in lecture rooms coated in a ubiquitous shade of cheap industrial paint vaguely reminiscent of the color green. There they discussed this most thrilling area of scholarship with a fair amount of heat, but far too little actual fire.  
  
Along with his fellow sufferers, Howl had battled the boredom of lost afternoons stupefied by the drone of uninspired professors. Whether tendentious or agreeable, each one of them was as universally unimaginative as the next. The catalog of practical magic, as it had been written down and transmitted, the stuff of all of those stultifying lectures and nitpicky examinations, did not begin to scratch the surface of the possible. Unlike the majority of his comrades, Howl soared when left to his own resources. From his earliest childhood, he had heard himself called an exception, a sport of nature, or a once-in-a-generation anomaly, a veritable young Merlin.  
  
Even when he was a young child, Howl had grasped that this magic of the classroom comprised but a surface understanding—the old proverbial tip of the iceberg. It bore barely any connection to the seething invisible mass of possibilities of which he intended to become a master. True magic was vastly more complicated, less easily elucidated, and far more dangerous than what he was being taught. One might say, and the pundits did, that either one had it or one didn’t. And Howl had it. He had it in spades and he knew it.  
  
Young Michael would be a strong wizard someday, still needing to learn more craft and gain some confidence. Calcifer, on the other hand, maintaining  the castle and all of the illusions and practicalities of the day-to-day life of Howl’s circle, represented something else entirely, more even than simply a magical creature: an elemental force.  
  
 _Star light_ _,_ _star bright_ _,_  
 _First star I see tonight,_  
 _I wish I may, I wish I might,_  
 _Have this wish I wish tonight._  
  
It was one thing to look at the stars and make wishes, even though one ought to have grown out of that sort of thing already. It was quite another to have one fall at one’s feet dying. There was something fundamentally tragic about the death of a star.  
  
 _Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—_  
          _Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night . . . ._ 2  
  
Etc., etc. There was nothing else he could have done. What kind of monster could watch a star die when he might do something to prevent it? Howl grimaced. And what indeed was his own uncaring heart worth, never having been wholly given to another?  


Well, what was done was done and one muddled on doing the best one can. In his case, “the best!” was not inconsiderable. Enough thinking of Calcifer and lost hearts, dying stars, inconstant hearts! What were hearts good for anyway? Inchoate longing, for one thing. Ha! Very useful. One could never have too much of that!  
  
 _Go and catch a falling star,_  
 _Get with child a mandrake root,_  
 _Tell me where all past years are,_  
 _Or who cleft the Devil's foot . . . . 3_  
  
Stars again! Shooting stars, luminous stars, dark stars, falling stars . . .  Releasing a rueful laugh before he shuddered, he turned the involuntary movement into a self-deprecatory, ludicrously melodramatic one. Ah, he should have been an actor! He could pretend to feel with the best of them. And he _was_ outstanding to look at, with only the smallest amount of enhancement.   
  
What _had_ he being thinking about that led him into such maudlin meandering? Oh, yes. Magic and the real world. The “real world” still meant Wales to Howl—the world into which he had been born and grown to be a young man. Not that it was in any way, shape, or form more real than the precarious monarchy of Ingary. Less so, probably.  At least in his adopted world, no one pretended to be able to wholly understand or predict the outcome of magic. Oh, there were safeguards built into spells and potions to keep the wrong person or people from using them, or from using them without intent. But in the final analysis, one never knew with absolute certitude what the result might be.  
  
In Ingary at least, no one assumed for a moment that the world might be safe, just, or rational, much less fair or good. If the world were fair, Calcifer would be free and Howl would still have a heart. Not that he really needed a heart.  
  
The kingdom of Ingary was as filled with mystery and heartbreak, confusion and danger, as any supposedly real world could be. Well, actually, Howl was pretty sure about the heartbreak, although he couldn’t remember his heart having been broken—yet a niggling something buried within him told him that heartbreak was a fate to be avoided beyond all others. He was _not_ sure how he knew that. A half-remembered something about lost hopes and fears, dreams and wishes, flittered just outside of his consciousness again. Try as he would, he somehow couldn’t grasp hold of it. One would almost think he had a heart. One could live without one, couldn’t one?  He had proved that. But at times he did not seem to have much of a mind either and he knew that he was clever.  
  
People thought of him as heartless, wicked, a heartbreaker, or an eater of the hearts of sweet fair maidens. Although, Howl could not think of any maidens whom he considered to be both sweet _and_ beautiful. Those seemed to be mutually exclusive traits. However, there was that one young woman—what was her name? Little grey mouse of a person, but pretty and intelligent also. Or had he even ever known her name—the girl in Market Chipping—the girl he met on May Day. She had more magic in the tip of her little finger than most practicing wizards had in their entire body. And she did not even know it! Now that was appealing.  
  
She smelled lovely also, of Lily of the Valley soap, clean hair, and a newly ironed collar over a simple dress. She almost, but did not shame him, reeking as he did of hyacinth cologne, his hair newly colored a bright enough gold to make one squint, clad in his best pink and grey silk suit with its trailing sleeves and silver insets. She had looked as fresh and as natural as spring’s first blooms in a forest glade while he looked—ah, how had he looked?—he had looked all glittering and polished, irresistibly attractive to be sure. All-natural could be overrated, he sniffed to himself. But still she had been charming, a bit of a sharp tongue on her also, which not everyone liked, although he did. He preferred a challenge.  
  
Enough about the mousy girl! Oh, her magic was definitely real. One could feel it in her—sputtering, straining, longing to break free. But it was a feral untrained magic. Frightening really. They say there is nothing worse than strong, untrained magic. Wild magic! How exciting that idea felt to Howl. Maybe that was why he could not stop thinking about her. He couldn’t love her, because without a heart he was, of course, incapable of love.  She might be kind, gentle, good and sweet, but she had no idea how dangerous unschooled magic could be.    
  
People had told Howl that his magic was rough and quirky and that he himself was a vain and foolish man (and proud of the fact he at least was his own man!). Sometimes it is better to leave things as they are. Let them believe that if they would; it might be safer if they did not realize just how sensible he actually could be.    
  
He yawned and rolled over in his grubby bed with one last sneeze. Sleep tugged him further and further toward blessed oblivion--no magic about that, commonplace sleep of the run-of-the-mill variety. Yet, a vision of her face floated in front of his closed eyelids. She was all large eyes, her delicate eyebrows arched in an expression of faint reproach, a sweet pert little nose, and that ridiculous frumpy hat as plain and tasteless as Porthaven porridge. That kind of a girl would want to wipe his room clean of dust and spiders and the residue of not entirely wholesome magic. She was white magic through and through, deep perhaps but not ambiguous. He ought to try to find out her name. Still, that kind of a girl needed a wizard who wouldn’t exploit her, who would be honest and not keep secrets, one who would have a heart.  
  
Alas, not even strong magic could make life fair.

**Author's Note:**

> 1, Of course, most people in our world will recognize the title as Professor Snape’s introductory words on the study of potions from J.K. Rowlings’ _Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone_.  
>  2\. _Bright Star_ by John Keats.  
>  3\. _Go and Catch a Falling Star_ by John Donne.


End file.
